Video: Configuring global theme features and post settings

In Drupal, themes have features. These theme features allow designers to toggle elements a theme can control, like if the site logo is shown or not. In addition to features, Drupal themes share global display settings that allow you to set which node types would have author info appearing in them, which is perfect for blog posts, but not pages or our flower products. Let's see what features and post settings are available in Drupal 6, and how they affect all themes. So to configure the global theme settings for our Drupal site, we need to visit the Themes Administration page.

Drupal is widely recognized as a powerful back-end system for web sites, but Drupal 6: Creating and Editing Custom Themes shows how the application can also be used to manage the look and feel of a web site. Web architect Chris Charlton introduces the core themes that ship with Drupal. He shows how to install and administer new themes, change color schemes, and add sub-themes to existing themes. He also demonstrates how to build a custom theme from scratch; integrate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and apply themes to specific nodes and blocks. Exercise files are included with this course.

Configuring global theme features and post settings

In Drupal, themes have features.These theme features allow designers to toggle elements a theme can control,like if the site logo is shown or not.In addition to features, Drupal themes share global display settings that allowyou to set which node types would have author info appearing in them, which isperfect for blog posts, but not pages or our flower products.Let's see what features and post settings are available in Drupal 6, and howthey affect all themes.So to configure the global theme settings for our Drupal site, we need to visitthe Themes Administration page.

So from the Administer screen, we click Themes and there is actually a tab uphere at the top that says Configure.Now this Configure link is different from the configure links that appear nextto each theme that is only enabled.We are not going to go here. We are going to, actually, click up in this tab, nextto List, and this brings us to the Global Settings page for themes.Now this page will actually affect all themes across our site.Right now we only have Garland, but we can still set these settings now, andhave our custom themes pick up these settings later.

So the first side that I'll introduce to you is the Toggle display side, theseare the theme features I was mentioning, and we can do things like toggle offthe Logo, toggle off even things like Primary links.The Primary links, remember, are our main menu navigation up at top, and the logoappears in the top left corner of Garland.So with the Logo now off and the Primary links also off,let's click Save configuration, and see what happens.

Now we see that Drupal has respected our feature settings, and has removed thelogo and the primary menu.Let's bring those back, Logo and Primary links, Save configuration and now they are back.There is one feature, before we leave this box, that I want to make sure isenabled, and that's the Search box.We are going to use this in our custom theme later on.So make sure it's enabled.Now coming to the right side of this administration screen, we see the Displaypost information, and in here is actually a list of every content type, or nodetype that is actually installed into our site.

So we see that default Drupal content types: Blog, Page and Story and any of ourcustom types, which, right now, we have as Flower.This Display post information, as it outlines in this help text, is actuallywhere you can deactivate, or remove the author name, and info details of thepost, when they are viewed.So let's actually make sure that Pages do not have the author info, nor our flowers.So I am going to go to, actually, before I click Save configuration, I am going togo open the Homepage in the new tab. So we can see right now, we actually getthe author details at the top of every Flower post, and of course, as expected, atthe top of every blog post.

We do not want this on the flowers, but we do want this on the blogs.So let's go back to the Themes Administration screen, make sure we are in Globalsettings, and we are going to uncheck Flower and Page and click Save.So now that our configuration options have been saved, let's go refreshour Homepage tab and see how the flowers will now no longer carry the author details.Click refresh and now Drupal has removed the author info from the flower types,but, as expected, not from our blog types.

We can even check our services page, and see that it no longer also has theauthor info, nor the about us page, and that's what we want.So closing this tab, going back, we can now see that any content type that wecreate, or is added by a module that we install, would actually appear here, andwe should come back to this screen anytime we've created a content type orinstall the module that provides a new type to make sure that we set which oneswould actually have posts information and which one should not.

These standard features available to all Drupal 6 Themes are good enough for most users.Theme features are neat but are limited to the defaults that you see here in Drupal.If you're wondering if a custom theme can have its own custom features, this ispossible, but it requires a lot of complex PHP programming, and should be leftin the realm of developers.

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Q: I have a button in Flash, but Internet Explorer is blocking it from opening up. At the top of the window, a message appears saying "Pop-up blocked. To see this pop-up or additional options click here..."
What can I do to this button so that it opens a new browser window and keep IE from thinking it's an unauthorized pop-up?

A: To get around the pop-up blocker, try using the "_self" parameter in Flash. So instead of:
navigateToURL(myURL);
use:
navigateToURL(myURL, "_self");

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